A gaping wide hole!

When the minibond crisis hit the fan, everyone ducked. Or at best, no one stand up except one, or a handful from the most unexpected place, the Hong Lim Speakers Corner. Where were all the people and organisations who are expected to fight or advise the citizens who are in trouble? And in the ST today, Chua Mui Hoong is asking for the setting up of an industry watchdog. She said this is an opportune time to push for it. You mean we don't have any industry watchdog? Oh, she said we have, but they failed to respond to the crisis appropriately. Or everyone was looking over their shoulder to see if someone was going to give the go ahead. Or they may not want to step on the wrong shoe or get involved into something that would put them in a bad light. This boils down to the incestuous relationship of corporate and govt in paradise. When govt is in business, not only that the roles of govt and corporations are blurred, you do not know who is what. Even the govt, the regulators, may unknowingly, unintentionally to put it nicely, compromise their tasks to regulate. It all added up to create this mess. Incestuous relationship is never healthy. And now we have all kinds of cries to question the selling of high risk products to the people. Why in the first place? Are these carefully thought over? We need watchdogs to look after watchdogs. That is for sure. We cannot have people floating in in their eight horse chariots when there is a crisis and rode away after slapping a few guilty ones. The watchdogs must really be independent, and not affected by incestuous relationship.

Judge I shall be

I reckon this is the most perfect position to be in life. Just sit in the office and waiting for people in trouble to come knocking. Then the judge will sit at the top of the bench and look down at everyone from the distance, totally innocent, calm and untarnished from the scuffles and mess in front of him. Better still, the judge should remain above and detach from the combatants. His role is simply to judge, dish out the punishment, who gets how many strokes, how much fines and how many years behind bars. Ideally a judge is best completely detached from earthly problems, and rightly he can remain blameless. For he is not involved, and has nothing to do with the problems people bring to him. In paradise, many in authority think and behave like they are judges. They may head ministries, corporations, administering big operating systems etc. And when trouble appears, they ride in in their 8 horse chariots and judge. Some will be fined, some whipped, some decapacitated. Then back they ride their chariots into the clouds to be near to god. Never mind if they are in charge of all the organisations, set missions, policies, directions, goals, systems, rules and regulations, they are blameless, like judges. Not involved. They are there to judge and punish. Even if they wake up late and turn up late is ok.

Preventing supernormal profits

Ho Geok Choo wanted to know why the govt did not set up an independent body to regulate electricity tariffs after the 21% hike. Iswaran's reply is that too much regulations mean that there will be regulatory risk. And 'If there's more regulatory risk, you must expect that electricity generating companies here will expect a higher rate of return than what they currently have.' And because we don't have independent regulatory body, 'Singapore Power...does not earned a "supernormal rate of return".' SP only earned $1 billion in profit last year. With independent regulatory body, they could probably earn $2 billion or more and the tariff hike could be more than 21%. Whew, Singaporeans are so lucky.

Milking to the max

When selling the flats during the first launch of the Pinnacles was already making a decent profit for the HDB, the additional $200k added to the second launch, when all the costs have been accounted called must be pure additional profit. And this profit is made from our citizens. And they called this subsidy. Then we keep wondering why our people did not have enough savings for retirement. The answer is simple. They were at the wrong end of the formula, 'Milking to the max'.

Australia continues to ban short selling

Australia must have seen the danger of short selling and is continuing its ban. And the Australian market is much bigger than ours. The US, probably the biggest market in the world, has now and then banned short selling. And we stubbornly or cleverly continue to allow short selling in our market. It must be good for us. I hope one day someone will have to account for this. And no one can claim ignorant of the damages short selling is causing to the investors and the market.